The Other Sides, The Other Stories
by White Silver and Mercury
Summary: Two drabbles for a loved one. / Axel/Roxas and Riku/Sora, fluffy if anything, T for themes that require emotional maturity.
1. What Friends Do

**THE OTHER SIDES, THE OTHER STORIES**

**two drabbles for a loved one**

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><p><strong>Disclaimers: Kingdom Hearts © Square EnixDisney. Everything else © their rightful owners.**

**A/N: These fics are for ShinraiFaith. She requested them, and it's about time I give them to her.**

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><p><em><strong>What Friends Do<strong>_

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><p>Roxas heard a rhyme the other day.<p>

_Roses are red, violets are blue_...

He never heard the rest because Xion dragged him off towards the train station, the mission in Twilight Town more imperative then the echo of some child's voice as she played hop-scotch with a friend in the dusty alleys of the quaint little town. There was a man with a blindfold to hunt down, after all.

But the words – or, rather, the idea of the words – had stirred something up in Roxas's chest.

He couldn't focus. He couldn't shake their eerie hold. There was some sort of emotional depth to the little diddy and Roxas just couldn't untangle it, so it rooted itself in his chest and began to fester.

Roses.

In one of the books Zexion borrowed forever from the Castle library, there was a whole chapter on them. _Florigraphy_, the old threadbare cover declared, and inside there hid page after page of information about _roses _and _violets_. Black and white pictures of healthy blooms, drawn by hand, and a list of colors below them – red, white, yellow, pink, blue, black. Violets were simple flowers, but roses meant anything from friendship to true love, to desire and passion, to innocence, mystery, consolation, or the betrayal of a close friend, and all of this was because of their color.

_Violets are blue_ and blue violets meant faithfulness. _Roses are red_ and red roses meant true love unless they were paired with white. Then they meant togetherness, and paired with yellow, they meant joy.

"What on earth could possibly make you want to learn about flowers, anyway?" Zexion grumbled when Roxas handed his book back, and Roxas understood vaguely that Zexion was embarrassed to have a book on something so whimsical. _Flowers_. Zexion was smaller than the others, more easily bullied – just like Roxas, so Roxas could sympathize. What would the others say if they knew Zexion had a book on flowers?

Roxas wandered the halls of the Castle, big sterile jumbled building that it was.

He ran his fingers along the pellucid walls absently, moving slowly down cold empty corridors, glimpses of the heart-shaped moon overhead lending its bruised light through a window here and there. He took stairs he'd never taken before, peeking around corners in precaution, dreading the moment he ran into one of _the others_. He stood under the broad windows in the Grey Area and realized with a sinking weight what he'd known even before spending the day slipping from corner to corner of the Castle:

There were no flowers in the Castle That Never Was.

But where did Marluxia get his crushed petals, then? That was the most unsettling part to fall on his mind: even Marluxia probably didn't have real flowers with him.

It was unnerving. Roxas didn't really care if the halls of the Castle were decorated differently or not, but the fact that there were no flowers – not even outside, under the great swollen moon – just seemed an injustice. Why, he didn't know, and upon what, he wasn't sure, just that he didn't like it.

_Roses are red and violets are blue _meant something, but clearly not to them, because they were just Nobodies.

"Why the long face?"

Roxas turned, jumping just a bit – a twitch of the shoulders, a leap of the heart. But he knew the voice, so he wasn't scared, and he let his eyes pass over Axel's face a few times without much of a reply because he was still sort of frustrated about the lack of flowers anywhere in their world.

Axel smelled like he'd been outside all day, hot leather and the roasted scent of heated skin, faint familiar spice of sweat on warm flesh, wild red hair and the lingering perfume of flames. There were some smudges of dirt on his face, near the line of his jaw, and his mane of hair seemed a little more out of control today. He looked tired, bone-tired, or at least ready for a hot shower and good night's sleep. But there was that crooked grin on his face and the dry dancing humor in his eyes, present even when he was ready to drop.

_Like a kid on Christmas morning_, a voice whispered in the back of Roxas's head, and Roxas had no idea what the phrase meant or why he'd thought it, alien and slightly confusing. He brushed it off. He'd gotten used to brushing those odd moments off.

"Where were you?" he asked, leaning against the windows.

Axel propped his elbows on the back of a couch. He draped over it for a moment, resting his face against the cushions as he let out a long sigh, deflating there. Then he held his chin in both palms and met Roxas's eyes again. "Agrabah, recon. I hate that place."

Roxas felt the smile before he knew it was there on his face. "Me, too."

"I could really go for some ice cream. It's so _hot_ there! I think I'm going to petition for different uniforms... You know?" Axel raked his hands through his hair. He seemed a little perplexed that Roxas didn't answer. "What about you? You want ice cream?"

"Xion's not back yet," Roxas demurred, brow knotting. But his voice faded out on his own tongue and he shrugged, smiling meekly. "I guess she'll know to meet us there, right?"

"Right-o, buddy."

_Roses are red, violets are blue_...

Roxas wanted to ask him about it.

Axel knew everything, and if Axel knew everything – about being a Nobody, about the world Before, about Others and Heartless and being best friends – then surely he would know what _roses are red and violets are blue _meant and why it made Roxas's chest get so tight.

But Roxas couldn't find the voice. In truth, he couldn't get a word in edgewise. Axel was off on one of his tangents again, hands slicing through the air with all his emphatic gestures, gravelly voice echoing, tugged this way and that on the wind. The wind was always scary from the top of the clock tower, but scary in a good way. It thrilled Roxas. It made his heart pound and his stomach twist. If he slipped, he'd fall and die, and that danger was addictive.

"Your ice cream is melting," Axel grunted.

Roxas looked between their ice creams frantically. Axel's was already gone, just a popsicle stick now, licked clean and part of Axel's intent gesticulations.

Roxas wilted under the weight of guilt, staring down at his ice cream. He'd only taken three bites and he just couldn't stand the film it left on the inside of his mouth. Sometimes he could ignore it, but sometimes he couldn't, and his stomach churned at the thought of finishing the rest.

"You have it." He stuck his arm out, giving the ice cream to Axel. "I'm not hungry."

Emotion shadowed Axel's face. He frowned, brow dimpling. "You're not?"

Roxas was terrified of the disappointment in Axel's eyes. He took the ice cream back instantly, even though Axel reached for it. He needed to eat it. He really didn't like the taste, but Axel loved it, and it was something they did together so he couldn't ruin it.

Axel didn't seem to care much either way anymore. His voice filled the silence again.

Roxas's eyes passed over the vista stretched out before them, so far below the clock tower. The hills outside Twilight Town were lush and verdant, the city a jumbled scattering of buildings and squares, crooked ocher houses and cobbled streets. If Roxas squinted, he could see the train chugging along on its tracks, elevated over the streets. If he held tight to the ledge and looked down, he could see the light reflecting off the glass doors of the station below them, and the people coming in and out. And the sky was a perfect burning palette of pinks and oranges and reds, a commingling as fragile and soft as watercolor. Watercolor? What was that? Roxas hated those moments of muted thought, like he knew there was something to remember but he just couldn't.

_Roses are red and violets are blue..._

"Hey, I bet you don't know why the sun sets red, do you?"

Roxas leaned back on his elbows, uttering a short little laugh. He felt the twilight, warm on his face, and the wind from this high off the ground pulling at him, begging him to be careful at this height. He closed his eyes for a moment, the taste of sea salt thick on his tongue. And there was the smile, the contagious one, the one that spread on his mouth so energetically with just the slightest glimpse of Axel's. Roxas gave him a tiny shove, shaking his head. "You say that every time we're up here!"

Axel pretended he almost lost his balance and Roxas's heart dropped. Axel laughed at his dismay. "So what?"

"Light is made up of many different colors – " Roxas droned, rolling his eyes and nodding his head. He'd heard this one too many times.

Axel's grin only broadened. He followed along with his finger, like a teacher listening to a student's recital. "And out of all those colors, red travels the farthest!"

Roxas felt the smile fall away from his face, eyes widening. It was a cold sensation.

But it had hit him with stunning clarity, then, and he felt a little dazed, looking between the rest of his ice cream and the sunset burning over this world.

_Roses are red_, and so was the twilight.

_Violets are blue_, and so was sea salt ice cream.

And it meant friendship, and it meant love, and it meant all these things with dimensions so vast that Roxas was afraid to touch any of them. They didn't need flowers in the Castle, because they had those colors elsewhere – but then he felt ashamed and at a loss, because _friendship_ and _love_ weren't supposed to belong to beings like them – and yet if that was the case, why did he feel the weight of them? Why did he feel the significance, the vitality? Why did it make him so happy to know that they didn't need roses or violets, because they had twilight and ice cream?

He ate the rest of his ice cream. They went down to the ice cream vendor's and bought more, wasting time until Xion showed up. And Roxas hated the taste, but he didn't mind eating it, because the taste was associated with Axel's laughter, and Axel's smile, and Axel sitting beside him where on the top of the clock tower they weren't Nobodies, they weren't Somebodies or Others or members of Organization XIII – they were just friends, and they didn't have a worry in the world.

Roxas ate the ice cream even though he hated it, because that's what friends did.

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><p><strong>End drabble the first. On to drabble deux...<strong>


	2. The Color of the Heart

**THE OTHER SIDES, THE OTHER STORIES**

**two drabbles for a loved one**

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><p><strong>Disclaimers: Kingdom Hearts © Square EnixDisney. Everything else © their rightful owners.**

**A/N: For ShinraiFaith and her mother, 4/22/11.**

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><p><em><strong>The Color of the Heart<strong>_

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><p>Death is a many dreadful thing.<p>

It is final. It is sorrow. It is loss. It is betrayal, abandonment, fear. It is cold. It is empty. It is relief, but it's also the unknown. It is irreversible, irremediable, and in the end, it is inevitable.

It is a very somber thing felt in very somber shades of numb inhospitable gray.

The sky over Destiny Islands that night had been gray, and the sky over Destiny Islands was gray again.

It looked like a bruise to Sora, the rolling silvery clouds and their dark reflection in the water. It was the rainy season. There were NO SWIMMING signs posted on all the beaches in case of sudden ocean surges or flooding, but nobody listened to them because this was a world of island people and island people knew the water better than general safety rules did.

The bruised gray sky lent to the world half-saturated hues, draining the vitality out of everything and leaving it all pale and fragile-looking.

Riku looked beautiful under that lighting.

Pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin, cutting eyes and mouth in a thin line.

"What's wrong with you?" he demanded, and Sora felt the smile falter on his face, slowly breaking away as if glass shattering into shards.

"What do you mean?"

Thunder rolled, somewhere overhead. The echo of waves crashing on the beach of the mainland was white noise outside the school, where it was the break for lunch and even though the rainy season breeze spoke of storms and tugged and yanked at skirts and ties and coats, there was laughter and talk and the normal chaos of teenagers and young adults letting their minds rest after hours of study, relaxing with friends over midday meal. Crowds had separated into their usual cliques on the quad, the wind tried to pull at sentences, too, and Riku had dragged Sora away from where he was struggling to finish his math homework with Kairi before the bell rang and it was off to class again.

_D. I. Prep_ the little patch on Riku's tie said, dancing along the front of his shirt because he hadn't worn his sweater today. Sora stared at it just to avoid Riku's patient piercing eyes, but it was to no avail.

They were in their favorite nook between storage facility and school, a little deeper into oblivion, further from where the bad kids were loitering the safe spot, some just goofing around, others eating lunch, a tiny clustered group smoking whatever new fad smelled like dried paopu leaves on the wind. And what would kids like that say if they knew that standing just a few yards away, distressed and fragile, was the boy who had saved their world, returned them to normalcy whether they remembered it or not?

The seclusion here gave Sora no comfort. In fact, it gave him no choice.

"I just keep thinking about her lately, okay?" he cried, and he hadn't meant to sound so vicious – he really hadn't – but it was okay because Riku didn't even flinch. He blinked, twice, then shoved his hands in his pockets and kept giving Sora chills with that piercing icy stare of his.

The impatience welled up in him. He couldn't stand to look at Riku anymore. He pushed him away and paced for a moment, then turned around only to find Riku slumped against the wall, still gawking at him.

"_What_?" Sora demanded, shoulders rigid and hands clenching into fists. He felt the emotion twist his face but he couldn't stop it. "What? What do you want from me, Riku? I don't want to talk about it right now!"

"What do you keep thinking about, about her?"

"I just keep thinking, why did they take her from me! Why is everyone else back home safe, _but my mother isn't!_"

There it was.

Given life by the spoken voice.

He couldn't hide it anymore, this grief, this pain, this tempest of devastation in his soul as gray as the tumultuous sky.

A cold black anger surfaced. It choked him up. Sora couldn't talk. He stood there shaking in something akin to sick weakened fury, glaring at Riku, and the cold black anger threatened to take him over. It was like a wave, crashing, the undertow dragging him under and sending him in somersaults, disorienting him, drowning him.

The sky over Destiny Islands had been like it was today that fateful night three years ago, when the zenith of the bruised sky had opened up and unleashed a power far greater than anything Sora had ever imagined. He'd touched a sliver of it, maybe, when his fingers brushed the door in the Secret Place, but that had all been childhood games.

Not that night. Nothing about that night had been simple or innocent, just dark.

Darkness, everywhere.

"I'm tired of being happy all the time," Sora edged out between clenched teeth, and he hated Riku for how impassively he regarded him. "I'm tired of nobody ever thinking about how I feel, how I felt, what I've gone through. Can't I be selfish for just one second, one second after all of it, just to be _sad_?"

A shadow fell through Riku's eyes. His face tightened. He crossed his arms and he looked uncomfortably tense like he always did when he was beginning to understand something, and Sora had to scoff. He just had to. Because Riku didn't understand. Riku had his mother and father back, just like Kairi had her mother and father back, but Sora's father had been gone to the waves long before and his mother was gone now to the voracious darkness.

"Look." Sora pointed up at the sky. A few drops of rain were beginning to fall, a cold pizzicato. He laughed, and he laughed because it was a reaction to the tears he felt burning behind his lashes. And still Riku stared at him, seemingly emptily. "Look at the sky, Riku. That's the color that it was the night all our lives were ripped to shreds. And you know, I'm _so_ _sorry_ that I just start thinking about her sometimes, or how unfair it is that all of you got your happy families back, and I'm alone."

The bell rang. It didn't make a difference. The kids sharing the nook hidden from the school were long gone already, startled by the way the boy further behind the building was yelling. The rain began to pick up, and still Riku just stared and stared.

The emotion buckled. The tears started coming like the rain, and Sora's shoulders heaved as he stood there, trying to regain composure. It was useless. He hiccupped on a breath. He covered his face with crossed arms and crouched down to his haunches, feeling the sobs rattle through him.

"_I can't be strong for everyone all the time!_" he howled, voice cracking insistently.

He heard the wet gravel crunch. He sensed Riku coming closer. He shook him away when his hands touched his elbows and he felt bad, but he also felt out of control so he didn't trust himself.

"Look at the _sky_," he demanded again, meeting Riku's eyes from under his arms with a clash of blue and icy green.

Riku stood over him, grim as ever. But, slowly, he tipped his head to look up. "I see it," he husked.

"That's what color my heart feels," Sora urged, vehemently. He choked on a breath. "That's what color my heart feels, sometimes, and I don't know what to do about it. I'm mad, and I'm sad, and I'm jealous, and I'm afraid – "

Riku's fingers dug into his shoulders, a forcefulness in his gestures that was frightening and Sora's eyes widened. There was a brief scuffle between them, like there had been so many times before, two boys and their reckless emotions, and it knocked the wind out of Sora and hurt the back of his head when Riku shoved him against the brick wall of the school only to duck down against him and seal their mouths together in a rough kiss. It was wet from the rain, hard enough to bruise, and Sora couldn't cry anymore, just tremble and gasp and glare at Riku because kissing wasn't what it was about. There was time for that later.

Riku grabbed him by the chin. He forced eye contact. Sora bristled, the taste and feel of Riku's biting kiss still lingering on his lips.

"It's a test, don't you know that?"

Sora's brow knotted. He started to shake his head, not understanding, but Riku's fingers tightened on his face, holding him still. There was something possessive about his strength, something dark and covetous. Sora's eyes widened again. The rain was falling in torrents now, but they'd backed up under a little overhanging of roof.

"It's a test." Riku's fingers were cold on his skin, like his eyes were cold with intensity under those thick dark lashes. "That night, when the sky was like this, I failed it. My heart's never been strong enough. It might sound pointless or cruel, but your heart is so strong that the whole system of everything – of life, of the world, you know – it _tests _you. There's a light in you that is so powerful, Sora, that every bit of the darkness wants to test it to see if you'll break and give in."

Sora grimaced. Like a little boy being lectured, he dissolved into tears again, quivering below Riku's hands. "That's what I'm afraid of! Don't you see? And I _am _strong, I know I'm strong, but she was my mom... I just want my mom back..."

Tears.

The cold, empty sound of grieving, of a strong heart breaking and sewing itself back together again only to break once more, over and over. And Sora didn't mean to cry so hard; he didn't mean to shake like that; he didn't even mean to be vulnerable, but he couldn't stop it. The tears came in hasty waves like the rain, and the way it felt to crumple down against Riku's shoulder, arms winding tight around him, was too much comfort to give up at the moment.

Images flashed through his mind. Riku, making fun of him for crying when they were younger and Sora had stepped on a nail in some pile of boards they were digging through to make a tree house. Riku, making fun of him when he cried because Riku had splashed salt water in his eyes. Riku, hugging him like this when the cat had eaten the baby chocobo they'd found. Riku, hugging him like this back when Kairi wasn't their friend yet because somebody kept starting rumors about Sora and he found out years later that it was actually Riku's doing, anyway.

And his mom, hugging him like this after his dad left, after a particularly jarring nightmare or a bad day at school, and if he thought about it hard enough, Sora could remember the way she smelled, the way she sounded when he was in trouble and the way she sounded when they were laughing together over something silly.

"You know what color my heart is?"

Sora coughed on a breath, pulling away from Riku. He was embarrassed to be crying. He was embarrassed to be distraught. He tried to wipe at his eyes but Riku pushed his hands away and used the sleeve of his coat, pulled down under his fingers, to clean the rain and the tears and the snot off Sora's face. Sora let him. He felt like a child throwing a fit, not a seventeen-year-old hero.

"What color?" Sora mumbled miserably.

"Blue."

Sora cut his eyes up, curiosity piqued. He cleared his throat and wiped at his nose one last time, taking a few deep breaths to try and keep composure. It felt like a weight had been taken from him, sure, but it was always hovering there, waiting to fall on him again.

"Blue?" he echoed.

Riku nodded. "Like the sky is on a bright day, or a good clear night. Like the ocean is when you can see through it. It's a constant. I mean, blue is a lot of different things, but to me it's mostly the color of your eyes."

A shiver rattled through him. Sora gawked at Riku in something next to disbelief for a moment – not angrily, but just letting the reality of those words sink in.

"But maybe..." Riku shrugged idly, glancing away. Sora was sure that even in the cold rainy season air, there was the tint of a blush flooding Riku's pale heart-shaped face. "Maybe the thing about having a strong heart is that your heart can be any color it wants, and never break."

Sora didn't mean to be impulsive. He didn't mean to seem emasculating, either. He just couldn't help it. He threw his arms around Riku's shoulders and buried his face there between shoulder and neck, holding on tight as if Riku was his last tether to the stable world.

Riku seemed startled at first. He stood there stiffly for a moment, then slowly wound his arms about Sora's waist, pulling him closer. There was a silence that didn't need words, simple and raw.

And it wasn't the fix-all, but Sora wouldn't deny that he felt the color of his heart begin to change again.

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><p><strong>End.<strong>


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